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He says Obama is restoring integrity of Brady Act while upholding 2nd Amendment rights, not usurping powers of paralyzed Congress

Laurence H. Tribe is Carl M. Loeb University professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. Watch President Obama as he joins Anderson Cooper and a live audience for a CNN prime-time event: "Guns in America," at 8 p.m. ET Thursday.

(CNN)Earlier Tuesday, in a deeply moving speech that brought many, including the President himself, to tears, President Obama unveiled several executive actions intended to curtail the prevalence of gun violence in our nation. Beyond the concrete actions he described, he may have hoped to educate and persuade the public, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. about the "fierce urgency of now."

Laurence H. Tribe

Most Americans will recognize the common-sense steps announced today cannot prevent all gun abuse but will still welcome them as ways of reducing the continuing scourge of gun violence in this country.

Most but not all: Even these mild measures have been savaged by some, including those seeking the Republican presidential nomination, who insist that the President's decision to act on his own initiative, rather than waiting for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to tighten gun safety regulations, is unconstitutional -- even tyrannical.

But if we take the time to examine exactly what President Obama is proposing, a crucial step that these critics seem to have skipped, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the measures he has outlined are well within his legal authority.

They are of course driven by the appalling frequency of mass shootings, including the recent tragedies in South Carolina and San Bernardino, and by the grim reality that approximately 30,000 Americans die from gun violence each year.

Congress' inaction, despite strong public support for stricter gun control, undoubtedly reflects the outsized influence of the "gun rights" lobby. But we can't infer from Congress' inertia that the President lacks authority to take today's actions on his own.

There may be extraordinary situations in which congressional dysfunction strengthens the President's hand, but there's no need to decide whether this is among them. Given the legal modesty of the measures announced by the President, Congress' silence is simply irrelevant.

Some of what the President plans to do involves nothing beyond urging Congress to increase appropriations for enforcing existing laws. Other steps are purely administrative: using appropriated agency funds to modernize the electronic background check system with the best private assistance available, hire more personnel to process background checks, and encourage research into "smart gun" technology. Such prudent measures in no way impinge upon congressional prerogatives.

Photos:Worst mass shootings in U.S.

Police direct family members away from the scene of a shooting Sunday, June 12, at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. A gunman opened fire at the club, killing 50 people and injuring at least 53, police said. It is now the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history.

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In December, two shooters killed 14 people and injured 21 at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, where employees with the county health department were attending a holiday event. The shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik, were later killed in a shootout with authorities. The pair were found to be radicalized extremists who planned the shootings as a terror attack, investigators said.

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Police search students outside Umpqua Community College after a deadly shooting at the school in Roseburg, Oregon, in October. Nine people were killed and at least nine were injured, police said. The gunman, Chris Harper-Mercer, committed suicide after exchanging gunfire with officers, a sheriff said.

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A man kneels across the street from the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, following a shooting in June 2015. Police say the suspect, Dylann Roof, opened fire inside the church, killing nine people. According to police, Roof confessed and told investigators he wanted to start a race war. He pleaded not guilty to 33 federal charges in July.

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Police officers walk on a rooftop at the Washington Navy Yard after a shooting rampage in the nation's capital in September 2013. At least 12 people and suspect Aaron Alexis were killed, according to authorities.

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Connecticut State Police evacuate Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. Adam Lanza opened fire in the school, killing 20 children and six adults before killing himself. Police said he also shot and killed his mother in her Newtown home.

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James Holmes pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to a July 2012 shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Twelve people were killed and dozens were wounded when Holmes opened fire during the midnight premiere of "The Dark Knight Rises." He was sentenced to 12 life terms plus thousands of years in prison.

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A military jury convicted Army Maj. Nidal Hasan of 13 counts of premeditated murder for a November 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas. Thirteen people died and 32 were injured.

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Jiverly Wong shot and killed 13 people at the American Civic Association in Binghamton, New York, before turning the gun on himself in April 2009, police said. Four other people were injured at the immigration center shooting. Wong had been taking English classes at the center.

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Pallbearers carry a casket of one of Michael McLendon's 10 victims. McLendon shot and killed his mother in her Kingston, Alabama, home, before shooting his aunt, uncle, grandparents and five more people. He shot and killed himself in Samson, Alabama, in March 2009.

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Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho went on a shooting spree on the school's campus in April 2007. Cho killed two people at the West Ambler Johnston dormitory and, after chaining the doors closed, killed another 30 at Norris Hall, home to the Engineering Science and Mechanics Department. He wounded an additional 17 people before killing himself.

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Mark Barton walked into two Atlanta trading firms and fired shots in July 1999, leaving nine dead and 13 wounded, police said. Hours later, police found Barton at a gas station in Acworth, Georgia, where he pulled a gun and killed himself. The day before, Barton had bludgeoned his wife and his two children in their Stockbridge, Georgia, apartment, police said.

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Eric Harris, left, and Dylan Klebold brought guns and bombs to Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in April 1999. The students gunned down 13 and wounded 23 before killing themselves.

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In October 1991, George Hennard crashed his pickup through the plate-glass window of Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, before shooting 23 people and committing suicide.

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James Huberty shot and killed 21 people, including children, at a McDonald's in San Ysidro, California, in July 1984. A police sharpshooter killed Huberty an hour after the rampage began.

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Prison guard George Banks is led through the Luzerne County courthouse in 1985. Banks killed 13 people, including five of his children, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in September 1982. He was sentenced to death in 1993 and received a stay of execution in 2004. His death sentence was overturned in 2010.

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Officers in Austin, Texas, carry victims across the University of Texas campus after Charles Joseph Whitman opened fire from the school's tower, killing 16 people and wounding 30 in 1966. Police officers shot and killed Whitman, who had killed his mother and wife earlier in the day.

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Howard Unruh, a World War II veteran, shot and killed 13 of his neighbors in Camden, New Jersey, in 1949. Unruh barricaded himself in his house after the shooting. Police overpowered him the next day. He was ruled criminally insane and committed to a state mental institution.

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Critics have focused primarily on the President's proposal to close the Internet loophole and the infamous "gun show loophole," which lets sales at these temporary clearinghouses escape all federal background check requirements and thereby undercuts the entire web of federal regulations.

Gun control advocates have long lamented such gaps. And merely closing irrational holes in its fabric -- holes that have too long let some gun sellers flout the clear meaning and purpose of federal statutes -- is a way for the President to carry out Congress' design, not revise it.

The 1993 Brady Act requires everyone "engaged in the business" of selling firearms to conduct background checks. It says someone is "engaged in the business" of selling firearms if he does so "as a regular course of trade," a description that undoubtedly applies to all vendors who make their living selling firearms physically or online, at gun shows or anyplace else.

As Attorney General Loretta Lynch put it, "It is not where you are located, but ... what you are doing that determines whether you are engaged in the business of dealing in firearms."

Yet, largely as a result of the NRA's democracy-distorting political clout, background checks have never been required online or at gun shows. By closing these infamous loopholes, Obama is restoring the integrity of the Brady Act, not usurping the powers of a nearly inert Congress.

That the President would have preferred that Congress take decisive action, and more expansive action than he can take himself via executive action, doesn't mean that any of the measures pushes the edge of any legal envelope.

There is even less substance to accusations that the President's actions will violate the individual right to bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court has recently given meaningful force to that guarantee in two landmark cases: McDonald v. City of Chicago and District of Columbia v. Heller.

Those decisions, however, invalidated only unusually restrictive local measures and established simply that Americans have a personal right to keep a firearm in their own homes for the purpose of self-defense, a position with which both the President and I have long agreed.

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But as the President rightly emphasized Tuesday, the Second Amendment does not confer an unlimited, absolute right any more than does the First Amendment.

The right to bear arms is subject to reasonable regulation and always has been. And the very fact that the right is enshrined in the Constitution ensures that reasonable measures to minimize gun violence don't put us on a slippery slope to ultimate government confiscation of everyone's weapons.

Although closing the gun-show and Internet loopholes by executive order may be legally modest, such steps are profoundly consequential as a policy matter. Permitting what amounted to unbounded "black sites" where firearms traffic could go undetected and unregulated has always been crazy.

By expanding the scope of the background check system and modernizing its administration, the President is making all of us a bit safer and is sensibly addressing a national crisis that our paralyzed politics has thus far been powerless to resolve.

I'm not one who has been shy in legally opposing the President's policies when I believe them to fall outside the Constitution's bounds. But having carefully reviewed the actions the President announced Tuesday, I have no question that they fall squarely within the scope of his authority.